rho's Journal: Quick and Dirty vs. Complete and Correct

Lots of advice for "C&C", I thought. Of course, in a perfect world, C&C is the best option, so advising others to do so would be smart.

So why don't we have C&C Free software? Oh, a few things here and there are C&C, but most of the Free software world (as I see it) is made up of Q&D Perl atrocities, or worse.

There must be 100 different "web-forum" software packages, all of them Q&D (and solving the wrong problems, too). The few that are interesting (Scoop, Slashdot) are best used in very specific applications, but largely are incomplete (or bad) copies of USENET. Why hasn't somebody made a C&C web-forum software? Because, nobody wants to work on C&C projects. They're slow to start, slow to finish, and the payoff is just as questionable as a Q&D project, but it takes longer.

C&C is not sexy. Q&D is. Which is why the Internet is slowing grinding to a halt, as nobody seems to be able to do anything terribly useful with it because nobody wants to do it right.

Free Software

[GoRK]

To be fair, there is plenty of clean free software and plenty of quick and dirty commercialware. Sometimes it is hard to make the discinction. Take X-Windows, for instance. Do you consider it "quick and dirty" because everything seems glommed together from many different incoherent parts and sources or you consider it clean and correct because the original designers put together a specification that has been extendable enough to persevere for 20+ years? Or take MacOS/X. Do you consider it clean and correct

You need Q&D to get to C&C

[TheConfusedOne]

Frankly you can only spend so long designing a program the first time around. This is especially true if you're building it for a customer as they never really know what they actually want to begin with.

So, you slap something together and you show it to them and say, "So is this what you were thinking about?" Usually they'll say, almost, but I want this different, and what about this feature, and why is that button over there...so on and so forth.

Frankly I believe we used to call this prototyping. Now,

Worse is better

[drivers]

Worse is better [jwz.org].

Also, second system effect

[drivers]

Let's say you do try to reimplement the whole thing properly with all the right features taken into account. Now you have a "Second System Effect [astrian.net]."